When you bring a dog home and they enter your heart, you are engaging into a soul contract to bond and love each other unconditionally for life. Humans and dogs are best friends, partly because they can activate each other's oxytocin system.

"Physically, oxytocin can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and promote calm emotional states that accommodate emotional engagement-and it is increasingly recognized for its roles in modulating emotions, " says anthropologist and psychologist Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center. "So if humans and dogs can stimulate one another's oxytocin systems, this can prepare us for special types of interactions."

While oxytocin is a positive energy exchange, there can also be a negative energy exchange. Your dog knows when you’re not happy because they can feel it in your energy field. You go off on your normal daily routine, sometimes picking up heavy emotions such as grief, shame, anger, resentment, worry and fear. Some of them you can let go of yourself, others are more difficult and you end up carrying them around with you, then in turn bringing them home to your dog.

The Other Side

When you come home from a stressful day, and your dog comes over to you to sit by you a natural healing process occurs. Your dog wants to help you so they willingly absorb your pain, taking it on for themselves, so to speak, and helping you to feel better. Your dog does a better job at letting negative energies go than you do because they don’t associate them anything specific. Your dog can easily clear these energies, providing you are not bringing home far more emotional pain than they can handle. If your dog has made a soul contract with you, they see it’s part of their job, and they do it willingly.

Now that you know your dog takes your heavy emotional energy from you. I want to share and exercise for you to give back in gratitude to your dog. And when you’re less stressed and more relaxed, there’s room for the body to heal itself, and there’s room for more joy, play, and living in the moment. (which is what your dog lives for)

Energy Release Exercise

Sit with your dog, put your feet on the ground and breathe. (bonus points if you are outside on the bare ground)

Bring your mind into the present moment as best as you can. When you feel present, allow yourself to visualize the negative emotional energy you’re carrying that you don’t need to carry.

Dissolve it away, and allow yourself to feel lighter. Know that you don’t need to carry any of it with you.

Now breathe out all the stress and tension in your body, and breathe in a source of healing. It’s as simple as that – you’re like a radio, tuning in to the vibration of healing, and you’re breathing it in. Breathe out emotional pain, breathe in healing.

Now, visualize your pet’s biological energy field, and notice how it is getting softer with each breath you take because you are more relaxed.

Allow the healing energy that you’re breathing in to flow down your arms, out of your hands and into your dog.

You can sit like this as long as you want to. You can stroke your dog or just leave your hands gently on their body. Dogs are natural healers so they don’t need as much healing as you do. They’ll get up and move away from you if they’ve had enough. 

The Goal

The goal of energy healing is to rebalance the dog’s life force or bio-field. As a holistic modality, energy healing sees the dog’s health from the perspective of his “whole being” – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Energetic therapies use different methods to help shift the dog’s “whole being” back into a state of energetic balance, naturally. This often results in an improvement or resolution of any number of problems. Imagine a gentle, non-invasive healing method that can address pain, injury and illness; and have remarkable effects on fear, anxiety, aggression, depression, and trauma.

This is a free exercise and done on a regular basis, this safe, effective practice can help to keep dogs healthy and well-balanced. Anyone can learn energy healing. Energy healing is simple, natural, and is one of the best gifts you can give yourself and the dogs you love. 

I look forward to sharing many more tips with you to improve your dog's well being on the inside of the community.

Peace, Love & Paws,

RannaLynn